Morality and the Environmental Crisis

The environmental crisis besieges morality with unanswered questions and ethical dilemmas, requiring fresh examination of nature's value, animal rights, activism, and despair.

Roger S. Gottlieb (Author)

9781316506127, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 21 February 2019

248 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.37 kg

The environmental crisis creates an unprecedented moral predicament: how to be a good person when our collective and individual actions contribute to immeasurable devastation and suffering. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources from philosophy, political theory, global religion, ecology, and contemporary spirituality, Roger S. Gottlieb explores the ethical ambiguities, challenges, and opportunities we face. Engagingly written, intellectually rigorous, and forcefully argued, this volume investigates the moral value of nature; the possibility of an 'ecological' democracy; how we treat animals; the demands and limits of individual responsibility and collective political change; contemporary ambiguities of rationality; and how to face environmental despair. In Morality and the Environmental Crisis, Gottlieb combines compassion for the difficulties of contemporary moral life with an unflinching ethical commitment to awareness and action.

Introduction
1. Environmental crisis and moral life
2. Why does nature matter? Paths to an environmental ethic
3. The spirit of ecological democracy
4. Can we talk? Understanding the 'other side' in the animal rights debates
5. Where do we draw the line? Limits and virtues
6. Guilt and responsibility
7. Changing the world: a moral primer on environmental political activism
8. Dilemmas of reason
9. Despair
10. Futures.

Subject Areas: Pollution & threats to the environment [RNP], Conservation of the environment [RNK], Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ]